Keith Piper’s 'Viva Voce': A Filmic Approach to Doing Art History and Confronting the Racism in Rex Whistler’s Mural

In 2020, against the fevered backdrop of the Covid 19 pandemic and the reignited Black Lives Matter protests, an image surfaced on social media revealing explicitly racist imagery on the walls of Tate Britain’s basement restaurant. There as part of Rex Whistler’s now infamous wrap-around mural – ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ (1927) - the image was not unknown to or undiscovered by Tate. The art gallery had for several years been grappling with how to interpret the much-beloved mural’s shocking depictions of colonial violence for its visitors but had made minimal effort to mitigate the offense and upset caused by the images because of its somewhat discreet location in the depths of the building. But after the outrage of 2020, Tate determined to confront the highly contested and controversial artwork by commissioning an artist to respond to it. This paper focuses on the result of that decision – the 2024 film installation ‘Viva Voce’ by Keith Piper, currently on view in the site of Tate’s former restaurant and surrounded by Whistler’s mural. In the paper, I will consider how Piper’s deep interest in art’s histories, and his firmly research-driven practice were vital to his production of the film. I will also discuss how the film itself, with its essay-like structure, temporal ambiguity and critical, investigative lens, exposes the imperial and artistic contexts in which Whistler was working, thereby providing a social art history of the mural and enabling contemporary audiences to make sense of its most disturbing elements.